<p>I stayed in the Hilton (Continental Ballroom 7/8/9) to see Geertjan Wielenga's (Oracle Development Tools Principal Project Manager) presentation "Getting Started with the NetBeans Platform." Geertjan's bio on his blog summarizes his involvement with NetBeans:</p><p>The focus of this blog is mostly on NetBeans (a development tool primarily for Java programmers), with an occasional reference to NetBeans, and sometimes diverging to topics relating to NetBeans. And then there are days when NetBeans is mentioned, just for a change.</p><p>Wielenga began his presentation by talking about how desktop-based graphical tools are underrepresented at conferences and pointed out that it's unlikely that flight controller software will be run out of a browser anytime soon. With this as a backdrop, Wielenga proceeded to write a desktop application on the fly using the NetBeans Platform (NetBeans 7.2).</p><p>Wielenga demonstrated building a new application from existing NetBeans constructs. He stated something that I wasn't aware of: there's not necessarily any requirement to use NetBeans IDE if using NetBeans Platform. He said the one connection is that you might think of the NetBeans IDE as the "reference implementation" of the NetBeans Platform.</p><p><a href="http://www.javaworld.com/community/?q=node/8491">Keep reading...</a></p>